I was talking to my Asperger’s friend once, and we came onto a topic of emotions. He told me that in his mind, emotions are represented by abstract pictures – he gave me very specific descriptions and even drew some pictures to me!

Do you see emotions as pictures – colors, shapes, lines, (animated, perhaps), etc.? Would you like to share your experiences with me for a research I am now doing? If so, please follow the link:

[link removed pending approval - d]

It takes 15-20 minutes. Your insight can help the autistic community very much – with this research we will develop a device which helps communicating emotions to those who find it a difficult task.

I can’t post my friend’s visual descriptions of emotions here because it could affect your responses, but after you take your survey (or if you don’t want to take the survey but are still curious), PM me and he and I would be glad to share!

Best regards,

Daniil Lukin

P.S. The survey is completely anonymous. Please do participate

This post was last modified: 07-04-2012 09:00 AM by d_olson27.

You know you have to get permission to do research on this site, right?

Approval with the admins is on its way, thank you! The research itself was institutionally-approved as an anonymous, risk-free survey.

If anybody has any questions about the research or the survey, feel free to ask in this thread!

Daniil

I can only "see emotions" when I listen to music and close my eyes. So it was "moderately hard" to do so. It required a lot of thinking, but overall I enjoyed the experience.

So why didn't you wait for the approval before posting your survey?

It certainly is anonymous. There is nothing about what organisation is conducting this research.

My mummy told me not to talk to strangers.

Oh god, I think I've made an error. I completed the survey which for all we know could be for you know who. Then again they probably don't care for our existence, never have, never will.

Ok, mystery man.

*holds light in front of mystery man's face*

Who do you work for?

Things are very simple, guys. I dont work for a company whose goal is to eradicate autism, and neither do I work for Autism Speaks or any other organization which represents neurotypicals more than autistics.

I am a student - a high school senior. I've been researching autism for the past 2 years, and am undertaking this project alone. After contacting people, reading books and papers, I got an inkling of an idea, but no institution that claims to support autism in my area wanted to bother with research. Thats why I decided to do it myself.

Why is this SO important? Because communicating emotions is crucial to social comfort! While those with HFA might not experience it as much, those on the lower end of the spectrum know how difficult it may be to explain what you feel. And, unless one can do so freely, one can hardly feel accepted and understood. With misunderstanging come depression, anxiety and tantrums, making life around people a living hell.

Thats the problem I am trying to solve. The solution will come as a free and accessible app on a tablet computer (like an iPad), and will be portable and suit everyone.

I do this project not for some sort of merit or profit (I can't possibly see where the profit may come from) - simply because I want to make a positive change. But, again, I really do need your help.

With many thanks,

Daniil

^Is that true?




-

I don't see my emotions ... but I feel how they change me physiologically and I can tell that way exactly how I'm feeling. I usually have to do that with anger and fear.

The bolded portion? Yes, that is true. Both as HFA and LFA, you may find it difficult to describe what you feel. The difference is that if you're HFA you are well familiar with the terms: "angry, happy, sad, etc". If you are on a lower end of the spectrum (or/and are barely- or non-verbal), you experience another barrier - communicating emotions through words.
In short, although it is not well supported by research that there is a difference in understanding of own emotions for people throughout the spectrum, it is true that mastery of the language makes is an asset in emotion-communication.

Hope that makes sense,

Daniil  

P.S. If you disagree with anything I say, please reply and correct me - personal experiences outweigh research statistics!

Although I have the language...I seldom am able to express to others my feelings because they don't seem to work the same way...for example, sadness, frustration, anger, dislike, hurt, anguish, sensory overload and confusion all feel almost exactly the same (and my reactions can be very similar too).

Excitement, anxiety, sickness and fear can also feel very similar.

Sometimes I mistake fatigue for depression.

Love, infatuation, and appreciation are sometimes confused with each other.

So, it generally takes me alone time, and thinking, and chilling out to understand my own emotion...therefore, talking to me about it "in the moment" doesn't do me much good unless I have already thought about it first. And sometimes, that thinking time is enough to calm me down so I no longer feel the emotion and thus do not need to talk about it. I usually talk about emotions if I notice a pattern of occurrence, because then I need help removing the stressor (it can take years for me to notice patterns in stressors and reactions, so maybe I won't realize how angry I feel about something until a year after it occurred--which the makes people assume I have been angry the ENTIRE year...but thats not necessarily true).

Happiness (i.e. contentment) is my natural state, I believe.

Also, I what I feel in one situation I may not feel in another, so...lets say I am angry at person 1, so I see person 2 who makes me happy in general, therefore, I don't really feel angry anymore because I am with person 2. But once I go back to person 1, I am angry again.

Therefore, its difficult for me to say whether I am angry or happy without an accompanying explanation for exactly what is triggering the emotion (except for happiness, which I consider my natural state so I don't have explanations for that). Sometimes the explanation is enough to trigger an emotion (because I am reminded of it), so that also makes it so that when I am happy, I do not care to talk about being angry (i think this is normal though, because thats what therapists say).

Side note, therapy has been very difficult because of it. Though I have the language, you could say my descriptions of how I felt were very "scripted" so I seldom got support I needed because I didn't understand my own emotions (and I didn't know how to explain sensory overload). I found I was better able to help myself by talking myself through something... or just distracting myself with something.

This post was last modified: 07-03-2012 10:28 PM by sg1008.

I did the survey.  However, I had one point which I feel needs to be made.  You should realize that not all autistics think in pictures.  I have the splinter savantism of hyperlexia, which is a facility with the written word.  So when I feel an emotion, it comes to me as an image of the word itself, rather than any other image.  All my thinking, in fact, comes from images of words.  I was non-verbal until the age of three, when I realized that the written word holds information which can then be represented as sound patterns, ie verbally.  But even now, the spoken word is gobbledegook until I have translated it into the image of the written word in my mind.  So it was rather difficult for me to answer your questions in the survey, since this possibility was not considered.

Another small niggle is that many autistics I know (I used to teach preschool, so came across a number of young autistics) need to take a long run-up at their emotions.  It takes time to work out what we're feeling and act on those feelings.  Sometimes I personally don't know how I felt about something until the next day, when I've had the leisure to sort it out.  While in comparison Neurotypicals appear to me frenetic and about as well-balanced as soap opera divas with their constant machinations and declarations of feelings.  Strange squishy emotion-filled creatures, who are apparently influenced in their emotions by how others around them feel, as much as by what is actually happening!  

Anyway, I hope this little ramble helps you in some way.
Alison

This post was last modified: 07-04-2012 03:52 AM by Alison.

I experience something similar.  It is like a delayed reaction to the event.  For instance, my middle son recently had a health scare, and I was very cool and calm during the entire ordeal.  After it was resolved and everything was fine, I had a few moments to sort out my feelings and became frantic - crying, even panicking.  I think most people would have the opposite reaction, panicking during the ordeal, then being calm once it becomes clear that everything is fine.  

I do not experience emotions in pictures, particularly if I am overwhelmed by the emotion.  I can't sort through my thoughts enough to grasp at a particular image in this case.  If someone names an emotion, like happy, it conjures up specific images.  Not faces though.

Why do we have to deal with the "Surveys" anyways?

I had a reputation in the various preschools I've worked at as the one who was calm under pressure.  Sand in the eyes?  Take the child into the bathroom without letting them rub their eyes, and flush the eyes under running water until the sand is out.  Bleeding nose?  Make sure the child is sitting comfortably and quiet with a cold compress on the bridge of their nose and a box of tissues handy.  We had a list of rules and I always follow those rules.  Whenever something not covered by the rules occurred, as it invariably did with a class of twenty five under-fives, then I'd use logic to think what should be done and in what order.  While my room assistant would be dithering or (in a lot of cases, sadly) not even notice there was anything wrong.  

The downside of that was that I was also cast in the role of a cold, unfeeling person, good with soothing little kids, but not really very responsive to the adult's concerns of who was dating whom, or whatever vaccuous thing they happened to be discussing in the staff rooms during break.  I'd generally do my Sudoku and ignore them.
Alison